


steps leading into the sea

by pipistrelle



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post First Series, the wandering years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-23
Updated: 2019-05-23
Packaged: 2020-03-13 03:29:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18932494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: “She suggests half-seriously that they go to see the Grand Canyon, but gives it up when Mulder tries to persuade her to instead go south to Mexico and the Chixculub meteor crater. It is, he explains, one of the largest confirmed impact structures on Earth, much more interesting and cosmically significant than an over-hyped ravine. Even if that's true, Scully counters, they have experienced more than enough meteor craters in their lives, and she's not particularly enthusiastic about finding out what kind of horrifying nonterrestrial parasite lives in this particular meteor crater, thank you very much.”Seven stanzas of Mulder and Scully’s cross-country wandering in the aftermath of the first series.





	steps leading into the sea

**Author's Note:**

> This has been hanging out in my drafts for literally years, 95% finished, so here it is. It was written long before the revival, before anyone had ever heard of an Unremarkable House.

 i.

They're up in the Rockies somewhere, driving through endless forests of pine and what she guesses, based on the little three-dollar guidebook Mulder bought at the last gas station, to be hemlock. Or maybe fir. They left the desert behind them three days ago, trading open horizons for a shadowy, tangled network of logging roads and unpaved hiking trails that don't look like they've seen a human presence for decades. Before that it was two weeks of sand and sage and a blur of unvarying motels in a series of unvarying heat-hammered ghost towns.

She likes the mountains better. She's had enough of ghosts.

After the first week she stopped asking Mulder where he's taking them, since he clearly doesn't know, and in the long run it probably doesn't matter. Instead of taking Kersh's advice to get off the continent in twenty-four hours, they detoured in search of the truth and, as always, found death. Now they'll probably never get out, and since they're trapped and they're together, one motel is as good as another, whether it's mountains or desert or seaside. Maybe she'll ask Mulder to head for the coast next. She hasn't been to San Diego since that Christmas four years ago when she lost Emily. She doesn't know whether going back would be a good idea or not, but she misses the Pacific.

She's pretty sure she's in some form of delayed shock. She feels weightless, rootless, untethered to the earth and in danger of dissolving into nothingness, up here where the air is thin. She has trouble breathing and tells herself it's the altitude, and doesn't look at the outdated road maps in the glove box which would tell her that they're not even high enough yet to register a decrease in atmospheric pressure. She doesn't care what the barometers say, she can feel the crushing weight of the sky above her slackening, easing off a little bit. After years of bearing up under a weight of such grief and fear, some of the weight has been lifted. She has Mulder; she no longer has her son. There's nothing to fear anymore.

There will always be reason to grieve.

 

ii.

In a town called Pinetop, the highest they've been, Mulder pulls into a little lot next to a sign pointing the way to a National Park. At the other end of the lot there's a visitor's center boasting vending machines with coffee and sandwiches, the finest cuisine they've seen in a while. He stands and stretches and comes around to the passenger side to open her door for her, offering his arm with a little flourish like he's escorting her into the finest dining establishment in the nation's capital instead of a dusty, half-abandoned tourist trap in a mountain ravine.

And it's a good thing he does, since standing takes all the air out of her lungs and a rush of dizziness drags at her like a riptide, and when the black blotches clear from her vision she's gripping Mulder's arm like it'll keep her from drowning. She gasps for air past the sudden sobs threatening to choke her while his other arm goes around her waist, pulling her in to rest against his chest, and his breath tickles her neck as he says in her ear, "Shh, Scully, you're okay, just breathe, it's okay, it's okay," over and over, like he thinks that will help, like he thinks this is okay, like he thinks anything will ever be --

She swallows a jagged sob, manages one deep breath, then another. She pulls away from Mulder before she's ready, steadying herself with a hand on the car door as he lets her go, looking at her with a smile that doesn't touch the sorrow in his eyes. He's free and safe, with the sunlight shining on his bare arms and one of his sneakers untied, but he looks like he looked on the floor of that cell, staring up at her out of a terrible secret. _I can't tell you, Scully._  

"I hate to say 'I told you so', but it's so rare that I get the opportunity," he's saying, and she realizes that he's talking about the fact that she hasn't eaten anything today, or most of yesterday, for that matter. At breakfast this morning and dinner last night when he'd tried to coax her, she'd snapped back _I’m nor hungry, Mulder_. She still isn't, but she can't stand him looking at her like that anymore, so she sits in the sun on the hood of the car and eats the sandwich he brings her that tastes like its plasticky wrapping, and she drinks the coffee with its faint flavor of gasoline fumes, and she wonders if this is what the rest of her life is going to be like.

She doesn't think so. This is a dream, this running away from shadowy enemies who may not even be pursuing them, this long string of days that blend into each other, uncounted, unreal. This isn't life. They're not even chasing anything; they're just running, aimlessly, because that's all Mulder knows how to do and Scully doesn't have any other plan.

She tosses the empty coffee cup into the car to dispose of later and leans back on the hood, holding herself up on her elbows, closing her eyes to savor the sunlight on her face before they plunge back into the leafy shadow of the forest paths. Her cheeks still sting with sunburn from the days in the desert, but she can't bring herself to care. The world is due to end in flames long before she'll have to worry about anything as mundane as melanoma.

A shadow blots out the fiery red sunlight burning through her eyelids, and she opens her eyes. There's a blurry, spiky apparition hovering in the sky above her head, looking like an old-timey underexposed daguerrotype of a UFO.

"Pinecone for your thoughts?"

Mulder's leaning on the hood next to her, spinning the pinecone lazily by its stem between his thumb and forefinger. She reaches up and takes it from him, like plucking an apple from a low branch.

"Mulder, we can't keep going like this."

He's quiet for a while, watching her face. Then he reaches for the hand that's not holding the pinecone and folds it between both of his. "I know, Scully."

At his touch she starts to feel weightless again, light and airy, and she isn't sure she likes it. She doesn't want to have to make this choice again -- this choice between him and a life that is solid, that is provable. After such an agony of missing him, she isn't sure she can survive having him back if it means the only life she can have is the life of a ghost.

He brings her hand to his lips, presses a kiss to the center of her palm. "We just needed a little time," he says into their tangled fingers, his lips brushing against her knuckles. He kisses the back of her hand, then her wrist, then presses both their hands against his heart, watching her watch him breathlessly. "I'm waiting for the all-clear. Didn't I tell you I know what I'm doing?"

"You tell me a lot of things, Mulder," she says, pretending she doesn't feel dizzy again.  "I still don't know whether you tell me too much or not enough."

 

iii.

They don't have sex. Night after night, town after town, they lay tangled up together in one narrow bed, his arm around her waist, her ankle hooked possessively over his calf; he kisses her more than he ever did before, his lips pressing almost reverently against any part of her he can reach, but that's all. She knows that he would do more, go further, if she asked, and that's why she refuses to ask. He's had enough taken from him. She won't take anything he doesn't offer with both hands.

They don't have sex, but still she is preoccupied with his body, the only familiar thing from motel to cheap motel. Death, resurrection, and a year of persecuted terror haven't exactly helped his insomnia, and he hardly sleeps anymore. The only thing that seems to lull him is her touch, so Scully spends hours running her hands lightly down the broad plane of his back, stopping to trace her fingertips over the puckered exit wound from the round she put through his shoulder all those years ago. Even after his breathing has evened out she doesn't stop, not until she's searched out all the rest of the evidence of their years together; the gunshot wound on his thigh, the faint white rings on his chest from the suckers of the creature that attacked him in that Florida hurricane, the thin crisscrossing surgical scars at his hairline. She relearns him methodically, solemnly, moving from one old hurt to another like the Stations of the Cross. She's sure that by now every shred of every X-File back in DC has been destroyed, which would make their two bodies the only extant physical proof of ten years' worth of wonders and horrors that no one will ever believe.

When she runs out of visible scars, she closes her eyes and starts counting the ones that can't be seen. Lying awake at night with her ear pressed to his chest she listens to the faint wheeze at the deepest point of every exhale, a souvenir left from the swarm of tobacco beetle larvae that tried to chew their way out of his lungs. And there are the nightmares.

His chest and abdomen are mottled with bruises, yellow and purple and green. She knows at a glance that they weren't made by fists. _Boot heel_ , the forensic pathologist in her thinks dispassionately. After the third or fourth badly-concealed wince she starts to worry about fractured ribs, half-healed or healed unevenly, but when she runs her hands firmly up his sides to check, he catches them, folding her fingers against her palms and bringing them to his lips. "Don't worry, Scully, they couldn't crack me," he jokes. She's furious and afraid for him, but she can't make herself yell at him the way she wants to, which is even more frightening and infuriating.

"Mulder, if a rib healed wrong, you could puncture a lung," she snaps. 

He smiles at her, and it's a ghastly reminder of how much of him is patched and crooked and badly healed. "Why should I worry about that, Scully? You always take my breath away."

 

iv.

She tells him about the Lone Gunmen, about how she and Skinner managed to save them from a genetically engineered virus and smuggle them out of the country to what she can only hope is safety. She tells him about Monica, about the love that sustained her in the face of consuming darkness. She tells him about chasing insect pheromones with Dr. Rocky Bronzino, following a number trail to the Triple Zero Killer, and letting the ultimate proof of the X-Files slip away to live a long, quiet, happy life.

She doesn't tell him much about William. Not yet. 

She's vaguely surprised, then worried, when he doesn't ask. He's quieter now than he's ever been in all their years together -- now, when she would have liked his monologues to fill her silences, to reassure her that all they've been through hasn't robbed him of his strange, beautiful mind.

One of the few things he does tell her (after he's thoroughly checked the car for recording devices) is that he spent most of his year in hiding with Gibson, in the waste places of the Southwest, with the nearest town a few hours' drive in any direction and hardly anyone to talk to but cacti. "Terrible conversationalists," he says, "too prickly," and she smiles despite herself -- slowly, like she's forgotten how.

Maybe that's the key to his new silence, she thinks. Living with a telepath, he probably never had to speak. If he's waiting for her to read his mind, he's going to have to get used to disappointment. She remembers a time when she could have read his thoughts, or damned close, but that was a lifetime ago. Now there are days when he seems half a stranger -- the stranger who flattened her with his heavy gaze and called her Dana after she'd bullied her way into the highest-security military prison she'd ever seen on the strength of a rumor and her own wild hope.

"How is Gibson?" she asks, somewhere south of the Nevada border. "How was he, I mean?"

"He's amazing, Scully," Mulder says seriously, with no trace of mocking or irony. "Not just his abilities, but who he is. He knows what's out there and he's not afraid of it. He’ll save the world someday."

The words ring hollow, false somehow, though Mulder is as sincere as she's ever seen him. Maybe it's just an echo of her own fear, the dryness in her mouth and the lurch in her stomach at the reminder that the world does in fact need saving, in a way she could never have imagined a month ago, for all she's seen.

Mulder must feel it too. He almost winces -- she doesn't need to read his mind to hear him cursing his clumsy tongue -- but then he's smiling at her, not letting her dwell on it. "Of course, it wasn't all peaches and cream. Let me tell you, it is a serious pain in the ass to play baseball with someone who knows where you're gonna throw the pitch before you throw it."

Scully imagines him throwing a ball to the boy who's as close to a son as he's had -- as he will ever have, now. She rests her hand on his on the gearshift and strokes her thumb across his knuckles, not saying anything.

"You know, Gibson always said that one of the most common thoughts he heard was wanting to know what was going on inside someone else's head," Mulder says, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye.

"The world would be a very different place if we knew what the people around us were really thinking," she muses, almost on automatic. It's her expected reply, her step in their old accustomed dance, giving him the thread of an argument to pull on until it unravels. Inviting him to chase this new idea down the rabbit hole.

But all he says is, "Things would be simpler," and she knows he's thinking of deception, inveigling, obfuscation.

Scully withdraws her hand from his and leans her head against the cool glass of the window, closing her eyes. Involuntarily, she remembers the night before, when she'd woken in the small hours of the morning to a room soaked in moonlight and Mulder curled in on himself, sobbing quietly, like a little boy afraid his parents would hear. She remembers wrapping her arms around him, pressing her cheek to his back between his shoulderblades, and being frightened by her own emptiness at the sound of his agony.

"Nothing is ever simple," she sighs.

 

v.

Ten years to live. Naturally enough, her first thoughts are of cancer, diagnosis and prognosis. She knows that Mulder thinks about it that way, too, from the way he looks at the mountains and buildings and people they pass. It's the same way he used to look at her when she had to stop talking mid-sentence because she felt the blood trickling towards her upper lip. It's a look of numbing despair that just barely manages to cover up the wild, desperate impulse to grab hold of what he might lose and hang on, defying Death itself to shake him loose. To scream and scream and never stop screaming.

She sees now why he didn't want to tell her what he'd found. He'd wanted to spare her the hopeless dread that he's drowning in. But this is familiar territory for her, this living with the knowledge of your own death, staring down oblivion without hope of evading it. She's had practice at it that he hasn't. Diagnosis, prognosis. Every motel they stop in has a Gideon's bible shoved into a dresser drawer, and when she pulls it out to read before bed she always finds herself flipping to the book of Matthew.  _Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour._ What a mercy that is, she thinks.

It's partly out of a desire to free Mulder from his despair that she says, one night under the brilliant stars in between centers of light pollution, "You know, this might not change anything for us." 

He doesn't glance at her, but she sees his brow furrow in the dim illumination of headlights. "What are you talking about, Scully?"

"Well, ten years is a long time," she says slowly. "Remission statistics decline sharply after that for most types of cancers."

He looks at her like she's slapped him, pale in the faint green glow of the dashboard clock. "Remission -- Scully, what --"

"Or there are any number of other diseases that become evident in later life," she plows on. "Heart problems, kidney failure. I'm nearly forty, you're forty-one. It's not such a stretch to imagine that one or both of us wouldn't last ten years. Even a drunk driver, or a completely random accident, a lightning strike --"

"So what you're saying," he interrupts her, "is that we shouldn't worry about the colonization because some strung-out kid might take us out with his parents' Ford Taurus before the aliens get the chance?"

"What I'm saying is that maybe the… colonizers… aren't stealing anything from us," she says softly. "Maybe they aren't cutting our time short so much as … reminding us that we have to make the most of whatever time we do have."

"Memento mori," Mulder says. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for in 2012 we may burn in an alien holocaust."

"Well, if you're right, and there's no way for us to fight back…"

"I hope there's a way," he says quietly. "Because you're wrong, Scully. Even if we do die in a car crash tomorrow, if that's how we're fated to go, they're still stealing something from us. They're stealing this world and its future. I know you can't just take that as -- as a reminder to make much of time."

"I don't know if we can do anything else," she counters. "And if you know, you haven't said anything about it."

He's quiet for a long time, minutes, and she doesn't press him. It's late, sometime past midnight, but there are still a few cars out on the road and she lets herself be absorbed in watching each one as it wavers out of the darkness ahead and disappears into the darkness behind. If she wanted to, she could imagine that this is another late-night road trip, another highway carrying them into the middle of nowhere so they can desecrate small-town cemeteries and argue about the nature of existence.

The silence changes gradually and she knows that Mulder isn't going to say anything, that he doesn't have anything to say, not now. That’s okay. They have time; a little, at least. She lets another half-hour of it go by in restful motion before she touches Mulder's elbow and motions at a sign flashing past, an advertisement for an inordinately cheerful-sounding motor court coming up in ten miles.

He shakes his head. He wants to keep driving, maybe all night, maybe until they run out of road and plummet over a cliff into the ocean. She can see by the tense set of his shoulders that the impulse to _hold on_ has got its teeth into him again. He doesn't want to take his eyes off the world for fear that as soon as he does, the aliens will swoop in and snatch it away from him like they did when he was twelve. He wants to stand guard over the Earth itself even if he's empty-handed and powerless, like he offered to stay with her through Emily's last hours. Like he once knelt at the side of her hospital bed, all but crushed under the weight of the inevitable and still unable to let go.

Scully sighs and turns her head away from him, settling down into the worn upholstery and closing her eyes. "Well, I'm going to get some sleep," she murmurs.  Let Mulder keep his useless vigil. He's like a moth to a flame -- and like a bird crashing into a clear window, again and again. Like something hollow-boned and fragile, that never stops trying to smash itself to pieces and never succeeds. (Not yet, anyway, some traitorously logical part of her thinks. But hasn't it always been just a matter of time?)

 

vi.

Maybe the strangest thing is how happy she can be with her life in ruins, with the world facing obliteration and her child gone. There are whole days between their ominous, half-metaphorical conversations about grief, days that pass in a haze of golden sunshine punctuated by unnecessarily gaudy roadside attractions (Mulder is predictably enthusiastic about the World's Biggest Moon Rock, but Scully draws the line at the Nation's Largest Tumbleweed).

She suggests half-seriously that they go to see the Grand Canyon, but gives it up when Mulder tries to persuade her to instead go south to Mexico and the Chixculub meteor crater. It is, he explains, one of the largest confirmed impact structures on Earth, much more interesting and cosmically significant than an over-hyped ravine. Even if that's true, Scully counters, they have experienced more than enough meteor craters in their lives, and she's not particularly enthusiastic about finding out what kind of horrifying nonterrestrial parasite lives in this particular meteor crater, thank you very much. And anyway, if she was going to Mexico it would be with Monica, on a proper vacation. Monica's been promising for months to show her Mexico City, which frankly sounds a great deal more interesting and relaxing than any kind of crater.

Ten minutes later, Scully remembers that they can't go to Mexico because they would undoubtedly be caught at the border if the FBI was looking to catch them. But that's an afterthought, not a serious consideration, and that's when she realizes that they aren't running anymore.

She knows what running feels like. She's done her fair share, mostly with Mulder dazed or half-conscious in the passenger seat, bleeding or concussed after having trespassed onto some government facility that they're lucky to have escaped alive. Now, though, leaning back in the passenger seat with the car window open to let in the warm air, with her shoes off and Mulder beside her humming along to Paul Simon, she knows that this is something else.

It's possible, she supposes, that all of this is a dream, or a delusion. That in reality she's sitting alone in a dark and empty house, burning herself up to fill the space around her with dreams of the freedom and family she's lost. That maybe any day now she'll start levitating Mulder via telekinesis and she'll know that happiness is nothing more than a trick of the mind. Sometimes that makes more sense than the idea that they really did escape, that they really are free. When the sense of dislocation and illusion gets too strong, she's developed a habit of glancing over her shoulder at the blue canvas duffel bag on the backseat. It's crammed with knickknacks that rattle together when the car bumps over cracks in the pavement, things that Mulder buys and brings to her, things they found or were given as gifts; keychains, a baseball, a pair of little drink-umbrellas shaped like aliens from a garish neon-lit bar ten miles outside of Roswell. Detritus and flotsam of the disjointed exuberance of half of America. Junk invested with a special significance because it is theirs.

Scully believes in touchstones, in reality. Despite everything she knows about the relativity of light and motion, she believes in universal invariants, forces that eternally reassert themselves. Along with gravity and the strong and weak nuclear forces, she knows, Mulder's eccentric love can never be fundamentally altered or prevented. Maybe it's possible that she could have hallucinated these long summer days of driving, but she's fairly certain she couldn't have invented the lurid green glow-in-the-dark baseball cap that Mulder presented to her like a bouquet of roses.

This is another unalterable force, this junk-collecting. Everything they left behind is destroyed, but already the substance of a new life is aggregating around them like the atmospheric dust particles that clump together into the nuclei of mile-high thunderheads. Without meaning to do anything other than survive, they are starting to rebuild. Already she can imagine all those silly things lined up on a mantelpiece somewhere (as tastefully as possible!), somewhere they might one day call a home.

The weight of grief doesn't leave her, not entirely; but as the weeks stretch into months, as the days grow cooler and the stars grow brighter and nothing and no one tries to kill them, she starts to feel grief as less of an agony and more of an ache, like the twinge of age she sometimes feels in her bones on damp mornings. Something she can live through.

There's a white pebble in a plastic baggie in a mailbox in Pasadena. Mulder plucks it out, weighs it in the palm of his hand in a way that suddenly reminds Scully of a story she read a long time ago, an Egyptian myth of the afterlife; the jackal-headed god of death with his golden scales who weighed the hearts of sinners against a feather. Slowly, Mulder smiles. “The all-clear,” he says. "It means I'm more trouble than I'm worth. They got used to the quiet of having me underground."

The next morning, when he wakes her up before sunrise with his unsleeping restlessness, she combs her hair back out of her eyes with her fingers and yawns. "What are we doing, Mulder?"

He grins, evidently choosing to interpret her question more broadly than she had strictly intended. "We're rebelling, Scully."

"By staying underground? Doesn’t seem very rebellious to me."

He leans over to kiss her, soft and sweet, pausing for a breath with their lips millimeters apart, their noses brushing. "By staying alive," he murmurs. "By living."

She gives that the only response it deserves, a soft hum of comfortable skepticism, but after Mulder has bundled her into the car and launched them both into the lifting predawn gloom, she begins to feel the truth of it. She sleeps through the sunrise and wakes in the bright morning and Mulder is beside her and they're going somewhere -- not chasing, not running, but breathing. Living. It is, she thinks, maybe as much of a victory as they were ever going to get.

 

vii.

"Here we are, Scully," Mulder had said. "The end of the road."

The end of the road is a little strip of beach somewhere on the outskirts of San Diego, barely more than a sandbar. It's separated from the highway by a low concrete divider and a gaggle of dusty, beat-up cars that must belong to the teenagers strolling and lounging on this unassuming patch of shore like it's the French Riveria. Mulder had looked at it like that, too, glancing at the knots of seaweed at the high-tide line and then beaming back at Scully like he'd given her the vacation of a lifetime by bringing her here.

She runs her thumb over the brittle plastic casing of the cell phone he had handed her -- prepaid, disposable, untraceable. He'd pressed it into her hand like a secret, then turned and ambled away up the pier, towards an internet café set among the fashionable hotels. Giving her privacy. The fact that he knew what she needed gives her hope that their instincts for each other are coming back, like getting their sea-legs again after a long time stranded on a hopeless, desolate shore. 

She waits until he disappears, watching the hunch of his head and shoulders over the crowd the way she’d watch a departing ship until its sails dipped out of sight, and then she glances down at the phone. There’s only one number. It rings twice, and then a voice says, “Is this — it is, isn’t it? Is that you, Dana?”

It's alien, after weeks of being only _scully, scully, scully,_ moaned in her ear at night and murmured against her neck in the morning and called sharply out the car window at another fuel stop. And yet it's so familiar, to be Dana again, to be called Dana in that clear, sweet voice. Like sunlight. “Monica. It’s me,” she says, softer than a whisper, so soft that even someone standing next to her would have had to bend down, bring their ear to her mouth to hear. “How did you know?”

“Mulder told me you might call — I probably shouldn’t tell you how. And he said we wouldn’t have long, but — how are you? You’re all right?”

“Yes,” she says, and the first hint of a smile that began when she heard Monica’s voice blooms into full flower at the realization that it’s true. “Yes, I’m all right. We are.”

“Good. I miss you. So does — I shouldn’t say his name. Mulder said this line would be secure, but —“

Dana feels like there’s no air, no breath to her voice. “You’ve seen him?”

“Just a picture. He’s fine, Dana. He’s beautiful. He’s got your eyes, and Mulder’s nose.”

There’s more Monica tells her, small details, things without meaning or context, with no weight and no paper trail. Things that can’t be disputed or traced. It doesn’t matter, nothing Monica says matters, what matters is that she’s out there somewhere, still living and working and hoping, watching out for William in whatever way she can, keeping a door open for Mulder and Scully to come back to life, someday. Whether or not they’ll ever be able to step through that door, having it open means more than she’d ever imagined it could. Monica’s love means more than she ever imagined, even more than it did when it was the only candleflame in a dark, desperate, meaningless world.

Monica talks for a while, and then she stops talking and they both rest in the pause, the silence, listening to each other breathing. Then Monica says, tears in her voice, “I should go. I don’t want to put you in danger.”

“Thank you,” Dana says. “I can’t thank you enough, Monica. For everything.”

“Of course. I love you,” Monica says.

After a while Mulder comes ambling over, his big hand gentle on her shoulder, his chest warm against her back. “All right, Scully?” he asks, leaning forward to murmur in her ear, and she closes the phone, closes her fist around it, closes her eyes so he won’t see that she’s crying. He knows anyway, she can tell by the way he kisses her temple. “Hey,” he sighs, his arms going around her waist, letting her lean against him if she wants to, offering her all the strength he has, a strength against which all the doubts and horrors of the world might dash themselves in vain.

“I’m all right,” she says, and opens her eyes. She knows she should be seeing a shadow in everything, the pall of decay, of mortality, but she doesn't. It isn't there. On the contrary, everything seems brighter, defiant -- the sun, the surf, the teenagers lounging on the beach, the adults walking dogs and the children playing in the sand, all of them vibrant and alive.

Dana Scully, a good Catholic, believes in things greater than herself. Dana Scully, a good scientist, believes that after she ends, the universe will endure. That life can renew itself, even from death — especially from death. That in the face of torment and the darkness that swallows all souls, in the face of stupid cruelty and entropy and whatever other evils might crawl out of the past or the future, the bravest thing, the only thing to do is to refuse to yield a moment. To keep having faith in the sunrise.

The waves crash in, roll out. Mulder shifts a little and rests his chin on the top of her head. “Do you ever think of them out there?” he asks, looking up at the sky that brightens even as the sun sinks into the sea. She doesn’t know whether he means the ships, or the stars, or the lost, and she doesn’t know if he knows either, and it doesn’t really matter.

“That imagination’s going to get you into trouble someday, Mulder,” she says, low and teasing and matter-of-fact, and he laughs, and she feels it everywhere they’re pressed together, and it’s enough.


End file.
